Thursday, February 05, 2009

A well-travelled envelope

Trying to track an envelope sent by speedpost from Chennai to Pune a week ago, I entered the tracking number on this site. It showed no delivery status, so I clicked on "movement" and this is what I get. (Pasting the table directly into blogger didn't work: blogger, it seems, can't handle itineraries of such magnitude.)

I am interested to know that the consignment existed in late 2007, and am curious to see where it will find itself tomorrow.

6 comments:

km said...

OK, Rahul, now I am going to ask you start mailing random things and post their tracking results. Anything to read those station names!

Abi said...

Six degrees of separation gone wild?

Still, it's good to know that our Post Office can track things some 15 months before they are mailed.

Keep us, er, posted.

Rahul Basu said...

You just didn't catch it in time...that's all. On 29th Jan 2009 it came perilously close - its perigee as it were, to Thiruvanmiyur. No doubt some slingshot effect sent it scurrying off again to Fatehpur via Warangal. Its now in orbit and you just need to wait for the perigee again. It's all your fault - you just aren't quick on your feet....

Maybe you should send this output to some Director General of Posts or something - methinks there is something wrong with their software :)

Rahul Siddharthan said...

All - in fact the entries on Jan 29 starting "Thiruvanmiyur" are correct: it was indeed handed in there on that day at roughly 11:08 am. Hopefully the last entry on Jan 29, that it was bagged with destination Pune, is also correct. After that it seems to have gone haywire. The webpage suggests some numbers to contact, but none of them are being answered. It also lists an e-mail address, to which I sent a mail and have not got a reply. As it turns out, the envelope is not very important any more. So I'm not trying very hard to follow it up further.

Arvind said...

Some courier services, like TNT, reuse the consignment numbers for tracking posts. One of the application files I had sent to Germany last month had "already been delivered" to someone in Teheran 1 year back!

Same case here?

Rahul Siddharthan said...

Arvind - well, there are entries from Jan 28 (and Jan 29 before 11am) that certainly don't apply to my shipment, and entries from Jan 30 on that hopefully don't apply either. I would hope that they would have a decent interval before recycling tracking numbers. It's certainly a bug in their computer system.